The Week: Donald Trump Poised to ‘Run the Table’ on 2016 Primary

Analyst states “Donald Trump is poised for the strongest primary performance in modern history.”

For months, the press and the Republican establishment alike have been expecting the Trump bubble to implode. Now that it’s clear Trump isn’t going anywhere, we’re seeing stories about a long slog of a campaign or even a brokered convention. But there’s a very real possibility that, far from those kinds of days of reckoning, Donald Trump could actually “run the table.” Ironically, Trump not only could win — he could win more decisively than any non-incumbent Republican contestant for the nomination since the dawn of the modern primary system.

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No non-incumbent has won both the GOP’s Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary since the dawn of the modern primary system. Trump has a real shot to be the first. And no recent candidate has overcome the kind of deficit most of the other candidates face in both national and state-by-state numbers at this late date, against a candidate with as strong and stable numbers as Trump has, and gone on to win.

If Trump wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, and then goes on to win South Carolina and Nevada — as he is favored to do — he could very conceivably win every contest, or at worst lose a favored son state or two like Cruz’s Texas. Nobody has run the table like that — not Nixon in 1968, nor Reagan in 1980, nor Bush in 2000.